I’ve been trying to get this shot for over a year now.
Capturing a head-on shot of an owl in flight is hard! You need a good location with a hill allowing you to get at their level. You’ll probably get one, maybe two chances on any given night to get one of them leaving their roost. After that your chances of being in the right place for the shot go way down. They tend to fly to one of a few favored spots to start their evening hunt, but there’s no guarantee they’ll pick the flight line you’re staked out on. And on many nights they’ll fly out well after dark. I have lots of grainy/blurry images with a barely recognizable owl smeared across the frame.
After over a dozen unsuccessful nights, watching each time for an hour as the sun set while the owls blinked nonchalantly in their tree, my luck finally changed. I arrived a bit before sunset only to find that one of the owls had already left the roost. I quickly climbed the hill, turned around, saw the other owl poop, raised my camera, and captured the owl ghosting right over my head. The whole thing was over in a few minutes.
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